The Girl In The Spider’s Web Review: We’ve Got A Swedish Superhero Now

GameSpot’s own Chris E. Hayner said it best when he compared Lisbeth Salander, the hacker and “girl who hurts men who hurt women,”

This leads to what is arguably the best part of The Girl in the Spider’s Web. Fede Alvarez captures a sense of urgency seen in the best Mission Impossible films, with enough adrenaline pumped into every scene to warrant having ambulances wait outside the theater. There are enough explosions, riding of bikes across a frozen lake, and a guy peeling half his face off to satisfy genre fans–not to mention the use of latex bondage gear as an inventive and gruesome torture device. Lisbeth may not be armed with an arsenal of weapons, but the film makes clever use of her hacking abilities to turn this into a live-action Watch Dogs. She out-thinks everyone in a split-second and is able to hack everything at the flick of a finger. And once Stanfield’s character comes in contact with her, they form a thrilling duo, with Stanfield being the armed gun and Salander as the voice in his ear, hacking and dispatching enemies before they even see them.

Did we really need to turn this franchise into another action-thriller, changing every character’s motivation and dynamic, instead of coming up with something new? Probably not, but The Girl in the Spider’s Web does great with what it has, turning the brooding Swedish vigilante into a force to be reckoned with, a female Batman living in a Skyfall-like world, complete with an origin story and an arch nemesis. Honestly, what’s the problem with that?